What better time than the day after the State of the Union address to be reminded that exaggeration, obfuscation, and just-plain-making-shit-up can be employed for benign purposes as well as sinister ones? Solas Nua's Trad is a show that delights in benevolent hyperbole like no other in recent memory, and its pleasures are plentiful indeed. Playwright Mark Doherty's wry, spry meditation on tradition and familial identity and especially -- O! How we we wish there was another word for this! -- blarney, falls somewhere in between Waiting for Godot and Waking Ned Devine on the sliding scale of existential Irish fearlessness vs. adorable, tweed-jacketed stereotypes.

Of course, stereotypes are largely the point here. Doherty seems to have written his 2004 play as a response to having heard an earful about the nobility of Irish suffering, and since the butt of the joke is not his native land's tragic history of crop failures and wars with the English, but rather the peculiar Irish way of mythologizing misfortune, you can laugh your arse off guilt-free.

And you shall! Anybody who ever squirmed through a lecture from an elder authority figure about how much rougher things were back then will have a hard time suppressing a smile when Da, the one-legged paterfamilias indefatigable of this surreal road-movie of a play, wistfully recalls "the oxygen ban of 1916," among the other privations and indignities he's weathered in his years. How many years? Well, his son Son is 100, so Da, upon some reflection, reckons he would be, well, older than that.

Michael John Casey and Chris Davenport strap on their legs and go a-walkin' in Solas Nua's Trad. Photo by Chris Davenport.

Being that he's a got a C-note and change on him, and also missing a leg, it takes a lot a to get Da out of bed (actually an overturned rowboat on a beach on the coast of wherever) these days. But the revelation that Son sired a child lo these seven decades ago, and that said offspring is most probably still out there somewhere, is powerful motivation indeed: "I've trip left in me!," declares Da, desperate to meet his grandson. "The leg, please!" And we're away on a journey of the mythical Irish countryside, our jaunt scored by Jonathan Watkins' buoyant folk guitar with percussion by Stephanie Roswell, also the third member of the cast.

Da and Son don't have much to go on -- only the approximate age of Son's son and the first name of his mother, which you can probably guess -- but garrulously they do persist, eventually seeking the aid of Farther Rice. Roswell, twentysomething and fetching, is an odd choice to play this old priest; she also appears briefly in a dream sequence, playing a part much closer to her own age and gender. No matter; she's a hoot as the stooped, flinty cleric, who talks more trash than Da and Son put together.

Under the steady hand of director Linda Murray, Trad manages to feel intimate and epic, specific and universal. It's a credit to co-leads Chris Davenport (as Da) and Michael John Casey (Son) that the heart of the thing never gets lost despite its seemingly bottomless well of Tom Stoppard-like rimshots:

"How' the leg?"

"Which one?"

"The good one."

"Bad!"

. . . and that's one of the weaker jokes. Damn if the steady stream of laughs doesn't end up, in effect, imposing an oxygen ban of its own, rendering you even more vulnerable to the surprisingly tender climax.

Trad (approx. 75 minutes, no intermission) is at Flashpoint, 916 G St. NW, through Feb. 17. Tickets are payable by cash or check only, but you can make reservations here.